My blood saves the coffee for later,
so I go to sleep. This is the dream
of the stale volcano: holes in the walls,
rocks in the shoes. The citizens know
their city will be melted, emulsified
in the glow of liquid ash,
and after knowing it a time
continue talking normally
from their booths, over the white ears
of the napkin dispensers.

At the school I ask the students
do you know what disaffection means?
I spell it out. And their blinking is
the opposite of frogs trilling,
for why make anything
is a reasonable question
when even your mightiest crafts
hang little in the vertical drear
of the doom-cone, the hurt mountain.

With people, it seems, there can be both food
and starvation, ready empty bodies
and abstemious mouths.
The trees of our breathing
and the trees of our hands
lost in the knot of the root-balls,
thrusting on clay. But then a knuckle will sprout
on a forehead, out of sheer resourcefulness
because some part of us still belongs
in the reeds where the song reproduces
in the face of almost anything,
until dearth, or talk
takes the water from our throats—

There are no strikes
in nature, no pickets over which the shore
refuses to transact. The sky
shakes loose a few gulls
like white hangnails
and it brings to mind
a kind of matrimony, a kind
of humble speaking on the beach.
So I wake instructed, and continue burning.
The bed is full of sand, the soft ordeal
of the flesh, loose clump of carbon fragility
in my moment inexplicably bold,
with death kept off, and the scrim held taut.